The Remains of Autumn
by cagd
Summary: Egon encounters an old classmate in a dream, and learns that sometimes the ghosts you see are the ghosts you own.
1. Chapter 1

"Hey, asshole! Do you know you're standing in a pool of blood?"

Egon looked down at his heavy boots and only saw the damp fading leaves of early November and a crumpled gum wrapper.

"Forget it, it's fading." He looked up at a small woman further dwarfed by a large canvas on a battered easel, which was decorated by a dangling row of decapitated Barbies and one disintegrating troll doll. "Now get the fuck out of my way, I got work to do - I'm losing the vision."

To the sound of bristles and paint being scrubbed across a rough surface, Egon moved slowly across a stretch of damp grass, leaves, and discarded fast food wrappers. A glance over at the horizon told him he was in Central Park, about half past noon if the shadows were any indication.

"I SAID, get the FUCK outta my WAY. You deaf or something?" She gestured to the left of where Egon was standing, wondering how he'd gotten to Central Park without remembering how he'd gotten there wearing only pajamas and a pair of work boots without so much as a subway token or a PKE meter.

Except for the lack of a PKE meter, most of life for Egon was like that – the fact that he'd just been told twice that he was an asshole reinforced the reality, though he couldn't possibly _be_ an asshole, as a live, free roaming anal sphincter without a means of life support was physically impossible except perhaps in the spirit world... which might bear investigating… then there was the lack of subway tokens and even more worrisome lack of a PKE meter, but it was blood that caught his attention.

"Blood," Reaching down into a non-existent cargo pocket for the still non-existent PKE meter, Egon kicked his way through fallen leaves and torn open condom wrappers towards the foul-mouthed little artist, "Do you see it now?"

She sighed, picking up a pack of cigarettes, lipped one out and lit it, free hand busy with a brush loaded with scarlet paint, "I SAID... never mind, it's _fading_." She dropped the lighter in among a mass of half-used paint tubes and well-used brushes, and through a cloud of bluish smoke added, "You're still in my way."

"The blood, animal or human?"

"How the hell should I know? Blood's blood, the way I see it - maybe from a mugging. Now back the fuck off or I'll mace you." Her free hand indicated a large can strapped to one hip before going back to managing the cigarette. "You've been warned, _asshole_."

Dab.

Dab.

Dab.

Egon moved closer, unconsciously pushing his glasses back up his nose, studying the roughed-in image of a bleak forest landscape where ghosts glared out at him from behind monochromatic trees with bare branches. More streamed across a gray sky of broken clouds. Blowing smoke from her nose, artist jabbed at him with the scarlet-loaded brush, "Yo, back off or I'll call a cop."

"You're in Central Park, but you aren't _painting_ Central Park, or are you - the trees are the same, but leafless."

Another blast of smoke, "So? I paint what I see." She went back to dabbing in painted red eyes.

"Where's the blood? It's not in the picture, and I don't see it here." Egon pointed about 30 feet in front of the canvas.

"I said, asshole, it's faded. Now get the hell away or I'll call a cop." She brandished the mace as Egon stepped back to get an overall look at her work.

"You're that artist, the one that outsider gallery in The Village is promoting."

"You're not as stupid as you look, asshole - my Gawd you're tall as I remember... what a hat rack!"

"I am not a hat rack." Egon stated flatly. "I own exactly one winter hat. I keep it in a drawer. Nor am I an asshole. My being_ both_ an asshole and a hat rack are physically impossible."

"You ain't changed a bit." More blue smoke.

"You know me?"

She spat out the cigarette, extinguishing it underfoot, "We went to school together for nearly six years, asshole until you bailed out in the sixth grade. Hell, our yards were back to back." Her hand was still on the mace, but it had relaxed somewhat.

Distracted from the painting, a dark mirror of the landscape they stood in, Egon remembered.

_For someone his parents told was beneath him, Erzulie Sappington had caused him a lot of trouble over the years._

_Kindergarten was when it started. Only there becasue he legally had to despite his early brilliance and towering over his new classmates, Egon had very logically told the tiny girl who lived behind him in a tumbledown tract house and whose eyes were always watching things that weren't there, that because of her small size she was obviously a mere 3 years old. Therefore, she needed to be with the preschoolers in the day care center across the street where she could play in the sandbox and eat paste all she wished...and why was she wearing boy's clothes?  
_

_It took two teachers to pull her off of Egon so that he had to spend the first day of school not doing quantum physics as he'd expected, but sucking on an ice pack until his loosened front teeth stopped bleeding, the scratches on his face and neck bright yellow with iodine._

_That night, with a police officer standing in the background, Mr. Sappington came over from his unkempt side of the property line and paid to have Egon's glasses repaired. Reeking of beer, he'd called Egon's father some of the same illogical things Erzulie had called Egon at school as he handed over a roll of crumpled, greasy bills before stomping back into the dilapidated house._

_There had been shrieks and a rhythmic slapping sound after the door of the slowly collapsing house slammed shut behind the man in his shabby mechanic's uniform._

_The officer got back in his car and drove away without comment._

_Egon learned his lesson; avoiding whenever possible the hot-tempered little girl with the long black braids and who wore boy's clothes when all the other girls wore dresses and Mary Janes - and who liked to draw while staring out the window at things which weren't there. Still, having Erzulie around DID have it's advantages: the rest of the class made fun of her weird clothes, foul mouth, and crazy grandmother; for a boy who was more interested in building a combustion engine than in The Beatles, and girls. Having somebody else take the heat cut down on Egon being called "Weird-Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh", EEEEEEEEEEEEEE-gone!" and "Jerk!" while getting his hair pulled and his underpants elastic yanked up over his head on the long bus ride home by the time they both were in sixth grade._

_Extracting your head from your underwear really cuts into research time._

_On weekends they ignored each other at the property line, which grew ever more and more unkempt on Erzulie's side as the years passed. Eventually Egon's father paid to have a fence put up, blocking off the sight of Erzulie taking care of her crazier and crazier grandmother, a tiny bent woman with tangled white hair who screamed at things that weren't there even as Egon planned his own battles with the Boogeyman or blew up the garage._

_What was incomprehensible to Egon even then, was that despite being somebody who dressed weird, that everyone called white trash, Erzulie was a straight A student; even beating him out in the 3rd grade science fair when he didn't take into account that the judges, though impressed by his scale model of a proposed moon lander, were more impressed by her display of salt crystals grown in different mediums._

_Egon had to admit; though his model was accurate down to the last theoretical detail, Erzulie's display with it's delicate frost of salt had been more visually impressive – even if the red ribbon he'd won no thanks to her blue, had gotten him grounded: no "Popular Science" magazine for a month – he'd been so upset that he blew up the garage again that night, only on purpose._

_And now, here she was again, in Central Park: Dirty Erzulie, braids now streaked with gray and down to the back of her calves which were covered in paint smeared denim, smoking as heavily as she had since the fourth grade._

_"You're the asshole who got me a belting the first day of Kindergarten."_

_"You broke my glasses. They were trifocals."_

_"I was the same age as you. I didn't belong in preschool."_

_"Why isn't the blood you said I was standing in earlier, in your painting?"_

_Erzulie pushed at Egon as he leaned over her work, bumping the easel so that the dolls danced. "I SAID, it ruined my composition. The blood would have diluted the impact of the river of ghosts."_

_"What ghosts?" again Egon reached for his non-existent PKU Meter._

_"They're everywhere, can't you of all people see them?"_

_"I left my PKE Meter in my other pair of pants." Egon paused, studying her sharply cut profile, "Have you ever had your eyes tested?"_

_"I never needed a machine to see this shit." Erzulie waved a dismissive hand. There was an 8 ball tattooed in between her thumb and forefinger. With a crack in it._

_Egon remembered a Times article from a few days ago halfway to the back page, "Your paintings aren't fantasy, they're reality."_

_Erzulie paused in another light-up, same old nearly black eyes boring into him - no, not into him, but at a point about five feet behind him._

_Egon turned, seeing nothing but a leaf strewn sidewalk and trash can. Erzulie laughed and loudly rinsed her brush in turpentine, "Dead jogger, head beaten in, not enough juice to be something you and your pals get paid to remove."_

_Erzulie too, had been reading the paper._

_"How long have you…?"_

_"All my life." Erzulie fiddled with the lighter before dropping it and the cigarettes back into the jumble of paint tubes and brushes. "After I got screwed out of that full ride scholarship to RISD by that blonde cheerleader who couldn't even Draw Pokey: she only took P.E. classes the second half of our Senior year when I took a full academic load. Sooooo, I muddled through four years on my own dime at some no-name backwoods State University buried in the Midwest. After getting fired from my third job in advertising, I started painting what I saw. Granny saw 'em too. Made her crazy. Me? It made me a living... and paid for rehab..." She looked up at him, head cocked. "And you?"_

_Egon looked away without meaning to. The disappointment in his father's eyes, his mother's eyes, their cold disapproval when his university scholarships didn't materialize as planned, instead going to a Senior that Egon tutored the summer before - a massive hulk with a hairy back who flunked Algebra I twice and thought mice hatched from eggs… but who was on the varsity football team when his high school had come in first in their division for the first time in a decade… proving that the son of the largest Ford dealership in the region was more important than the son of the owner and chief researcher of an independent biological research lab.  
_

_"I liked your salt display." Egon mumbled._

_"You were always better at math than me." Erzulie rocked back and forth on her heels, focusing __on the distant burnt stump of what had once been a luxury apartment building from the 1920s._  


_"You could draw a straight line without a ruler." he added, following her gaze.  
_

_"Shit, why didn't you ask me to help with the Boogeyman? I would have climbed that damned fence. AND I would have brought one of my old man's tire irons… or his belt."_

_"You knew?" Egon forgot about counting the windows on the top floor of some high-rise, and stared at her._

_"Son of a bitch told me after I smacked him on the head with a broken chair leg! He said you were smarter, but I was more violent."_

_They stood silently facing each other, Egon polishing his glasses, the canvas a background against the remains of autumn, two different visions of Central Park, both accurate._

_Finally he broke the silence, "We were on the same team, the whole time and never knew,"_

_The canvas fell off the easel in a sudden gust of wind and broken dolls, spilling black, white, and red paint onto the damp grass and leaves..._

…Egon sat up in bed, reaching for his glasses before turning on the light on the nightstand. In the snore-filled half darkness of the fire station he picked up a crumpled newspaper from the floor beside the bed from where it had fallen to cover a pair of damp, grass-stained work boots.

As the traffic of the day shift warmed up to a slow, dull roar, Egon shuffled through to the arts section: he was right.

Someone named Erzulie Sappington was giving a show for the next two months at a small Village gallery specializing in occult and outsider artists.

Though the name was the same, he could still be wrong.

"Day off Egon, where you gonna go? Natural History Museum, molds and fungi department?" Peter wandered past half-asleep, coffee cup in one hand.

Egon paused - fungi held a lot of appeal, _however:_ "I may go and visit an art gallery."

If he did, he'd take a PKE Meter.


	2. Chapter 2

After enduring a long, crowded subway ride followed by a ride in a taxi driven by a man who apparently considered bathing a crime and armed with an address written down on the back of an old job sheet, Egon found the gallery, which was crammed between a coffee shop and a high-end junk emporium.

Egon pushed past the detritus of other people's discarded things for sale at top prices, (though there _was_ a phrenological head that might be worth coming back for later) entered the gallery, and was instantly assaulted by the stench of patchouli and dragon's blood.

He also attracted the attention of a short, fat man with a pierced nose and spiked hair which accentuated the fact that not only was the man going bald, but that he would never see 50 again in ANYONE'S lifetime.

Rapidly patting his heavily ringed pudgy hands together, the little man waddled over, rubber spiders and plastic skulls swinging from the heavy chrome chains piled around his neck, nearly obscuring his leather bustier. Egon also couldn't help notice that the little man was wearing a kilt, garters, fishnet tights, and stiletto heels - Egon had trapped and cataloged weirder things than this… but not many.

Beating a hasty retreat from the claustrophobic space and its occupant, a painting caught his eye from where it hung on the stripped to the bricks wall among a mass of paintings of weeping vampires in torn lingerie and male dark-winged angels stripped to the waist.

"Ohhhhh yes," the little man trilled, nose ring bobbing up and down. Temporarily distracted, Egon stared, mesmerized by how it kept perfect time with what the wearer said. "I see you are a serious collector - pay no attention to all this drama, it used to be Punk was all the rage, now it's something called Goth," He rolled his heavily mascara-ringed eyes, "Goth uses most of the same aesthetics- I've simply SAVED a fortune on wardrobe – these days, if you want to sell twee disguised as art, you have GOT to keep ahead of the trends… oh how I miss Warhol and his Factory… oooooh! I see you've got an eye on an Erzulie Sappington, the only REAL art in this place – I discovered her sleeping in her car last October –in the back of that eyesore of a BMW she had a STACK, and I do mean a STACK of the most simply MARVELOUS paintings – and nowhere to sell them."

Egon walked past the man, nose ring forgotten.

It was the same painting.

The stream of ghosts over the skyline was there. The ones glaring out from behind the bare trees were dwarfed by the buildings which loomed threateningly over Central park – everything was there.

Including a pool of blood in the foreground.

Egon frowned at the sudden blast of music that sounded like someone was having a double mastectomy without the benefit of anesthesia to the scream of a chainsaw - a long wailing something or other about the sorrows of being a dark angel and the joys drinking Type O. from the original container; Ray Stanz getting his tongue stuck to a frozen doorknob last January had more musicality. Two more customers entered, tall thin creatures of indeterminate gender draped in black, plastic fangs jutting out over their black painted lower lips. Egon took out his PKE meter, gave them a cursory reading, and put it away – human. All but skipping to meet the newcomers, the gallery owner abandoned the sound system.

Ears ringing, Egon moved along the painting hung wall, searching for more Erzulie Simpsons before returning to the first painting, standing about five feet back while polishing his glasses.

"You sir, are a man of taste." the little man cooed, having seen the two out the door empty-handed and turning the sound system down to a background snarl of musical rip sawing, "You sir, are a man of taste, I can tell, I CAN TELL. Those two? Pfui! All tattoos and no dough, but you sir, are DECIDEDLY a man of taste. This, _this_ one is the last – she asked me to hold this one back until this morning - you're the first to see it." The nose ring wobbled up and down, "Too bad I don't know where she is – should you buy this one, the best I assure you, of the entire portfolio AND original. If I ever find her again, she hasn't dropped by for a week, not even to claim her check, you know how artists are… If I ever find her again, I'll commission a series from her based off of just this one alone!"

"How much?" Egon would have preferred the phrenology head.

The man pointed at the tag in the lower left hand of the canvas and coyly named a slightly lower price, "Because I (giggle) like you, I've reduced the price somewhat."

An hour later Egon found himself with a bulky panting balanced across his knees and an invitation to "Come see me, ANY TIME handsome!" from a man wearing women's underwear, tire chains, old Halloween novelties, and a kilt, The phrenology head, now wrapped in old newspapers was clamped between his feet in the garishly lit subway car loaded down with Saturday evening party goers, street punks, and cleaning ladies on their way to and from work.

Snorting the last dregs of cheap incense from his nostrils but not his clothes into a tissue, Egon's head wobbled back and forth in time to the rocking of the car as he fought the urge to doze off, something he'd been doing a lot of lately – yes, influenza was definitely pursuing him... Egon's head fell forward just before his stop, glasses sliding down his nose as the gurgle and roar of water filled his head… the lights of the subway car flickering...

_...it was wet and cold - light rippled off of the gray surface high above him. Around him he could feel the slight jostling of logs and trash against his body as the current that both supported and trapped him rushed by smelling of mud and diesel._

_A flight of pigeons wheeled overhead as a barge chugged past, jostling the logs and trash and Egon's body so that his hand drifted past his milky eyes, Between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand was a tattooed 8 ball with a crack in it… his jaw dropped open in a silent scream._


	3. Chapter 3

Egon slept through his subway stop.

He slept through the next one.

And the next.

Head back, mouth open, he slept through more stops, sweating, breath ragged and raspy…

…_as someone grabbed him by the braids, holding him down by them, the sting of a belt on his shoulder blades, of hiding under beds while his father raged around the house looking for him, stealing cigarettes from the candy store, of lighting up in the school bathroom while trying to memorize formula, staring longingly at the dresses in the downtown shop windows, getting caught stealing a pair of shoes, of stealing leftover spaghetti from the trash cans behind his best friend's father's garage one cold night because his new stepmother wanted to go the Vegas and didn't want a kid along, of picking the lock of his best friend's house during Christmas break, softly walking into his room, watching him sleep on clean sheets, of envying his microscope, his telescope, his model molecules and the poster of Einstein, of taking the stack of coveted college textbooks – they were so rich they wouldn't miss them, right?_

_(So that's where they got off to.)_

_If he could only read them, he could catch up with his best friend and join him..._

_...of running away to Woodstock, of wandering around in the music and the mud at the age of thirteen in a dress made of somebody's old lace curtains, half stoned out of his mind, hair unbraided and down to his waist, flowing in the wind as Jimi Hendrix (I hate Jimi Hendrix.) bared it all through his guitar and Janis (Who is Janis?) took everyone all the way – doing everyone that came along, of getting caught on the ride to Haight-Ashbury when the Quaaludes he'd gulped down reacted bad so that the ghosts he could usually ignore became threatening and he'd flaked out during Easy Rider (That was a boring movie without a point.) and being sent home to his father in disgrace, of being dragged through the house, (a strange, dirty house, not at all the surgical cleanliness his mother demanded) as his stepmother (I have no step mother.) jeered insults, the slap of the belt, back still stinging from the belt, back in blue jeans, taking the books out of their hiding place under his mattress, making notes in the margins, promising that he'd return them as soon as he understood them – they were so rich they wouldn't miss them, of going back to school, the stares, the ghosts, always the ghosts, his grandmother screaming until the County took over, the welcome silence, the belt, the stares, the running away over and over again, of sending his best friend a birthday present – his favorite snack and a drawing that took a week to do when his dad and the teachers weren't looking, of wondering if he got it (My freshman room mate, Peter Venkman, tore the drawing into strips and roiled joints in the paper. Then he ate the Twinkie after smoking an entire nickel bag of marijuana during finals.) of never hearing from him, of stealing pot roast from his dad's trash cans one night because he couldn't take the hunger and it had smelled so good, of hitchhiking to MIT and standing outside in the dark, ghosts, curtain dress, and unbraided hair swirling around him in the evening breeze looking up at his profile in the third floor window against the light as he studied until 2 a.m. – wanting to toss a pebble against the window to get his attention just so he could wave and maybe come up and hang out for a while, maybe talk physics and art but not having the courage, of getting sent back by Campus Security, of another beating, in school suspension, of accidentally failing English Composition, of dropping out surrounded by ghosts, of hitchhiking to Haight Ashbury of hooking to earning his way – men like 'em young, of wandering the streets of San Francisco, caught up in the magic until he got caught and sent back in disgrace… of the abortion, (?) of dropping out, of trying to get into the WACS (I sat with Peter as he got silently drunk the day his mother's letter came informing him that his older brother Robert had been killed in the Tet Offensive, would he please come home for the funeral?) Of trying to get into the WAVES, the SPARS, the WRENS - nobody wants a minor with a record..._

_...of being personally asked to leave the Family by Charlie Manson himself because he was too weird even for them, of hearing the news of what Charlie and his Family had done to Sharon Tate the night after he'd left, underage, hung over, and wondering where he could go, the books that he thought were his ticket OUT so very far away under the mattress in his room, his old man waiting for him with a belt (My father never laid a hand on me.), of sending another birthday present..._

_ ...of waking up one day in the mid-70s in rehab, of walking into a High School somewhere in Kansas City and absent-mindedly passing the G.E.D. upon request without even studying, of getting into some small-time State university (I was working on my fourth Doctorate at Cornell.), of casually wandering through the four years it took to get a B.F.A in art because it was the only thing he could think of, figuring that he was stupid to even think he could play in his now un-findable best friend's league, of taking small jobs here and there just to pay the rent, of blowing his stack, ghosts streaming around him… of wondering where hi best friend had gotten off to, of seeing his picture on a national magazine the day he got fired AGAIN for blowing up at a client and his stupid diaper campaign, of facing reality and doing the best her could to record what he saw that everybody else seemed able to ignore..._

_...of getting a tattoo of an 8 ball on one hand because it seemed right... (Tattoos are irrational.)_

_ ...of finding a gallery willing to sell his work, of waking up in the back of his battered BMW at 2 a.m. reading by the flickering dome light once more about his best friend in the same old magazine, of how he was doing so much better than he was, of how he wanted so badly to see him again, of finding the courage to go home (I don't like home.) one more time because maybe your best friend would like his books back and hey, stealing 'em hadn't been as good an idea as it had seemed at the time, what had it gotten him? _

…_of not even making it to his old room before his old man caught him slipping back into the house he'd tried his best to escape over and over again._

…_of the argument that led to a shoving match._

…_of falling in the kitchen... _

…_of catching the back of his head on the edge of the stove on his way to the dirty, cracked linoleum._

…_of the world going red, then black as his father, dirty and unshaven as ever, leaned over his him, slapping his face, shaking him, apologizing for the first time in his angry, drunken life, trying to get him up on his feet as hot fluid poured out of his ears._

…_of being dimly aware of being wrapped in something._

…_of a long, rough ride._

…_of the cold…_

…_of the sensation of flying, stopped the cold, wet slap of water… (Help! Dad, where are you?)_

…_of trying to break free… (I can't breathe!)_

…_of bobbing to the surface… (This isn't real.)_

…_unable to move… the water painfully cold… (Help! Father, how could you do this to me?)_

…_fading away watching the stars as the icy current dragged him under a bridge he thought he recognized…_

"Yo, buddy. You can either sleep it off in the drunk tank or you can sleep it off in your own bed. What'll it be?"

Egon surfaced, gasping, dropping the painting, banging his head on the glass window behind him, trying to process what was going on in his head while focusing on the cop standing over him poking him with a kitana.

Egon mumbled out something, gathered up the painting (The phrenology head was gone, as was his wallet), and with a slight stagger accompanied by hot and cold chills, made his way out of the empty subway car, across the platform, up the stairs and on to the street where it was snowing, only the snow melted before it could reach the ground.

"_Sorry, asshole didn't mean to leak all over you like that."_

"Who said that?" Egon turned slowly, thick glasses glinting in the streetlights overhead, eyes scanning; except for the falling snow and the painting, he was alone.

He waved down the one lone cab that he saw; Peter, or was it Ray? Paid his fare when he got back to the station.


	4. Chapter 4

It was dawn now, and the Hope Memorial Bridge, coated with a thin glaze of ice followed by snow now falling heavily from the Northwest, was shut down; traffic re-routed to lesser, arteries as Cleveland started up for the day and headed for work.

Snow and ice wasn't the real reason the traffic had been rerouted.

Cars were being towed off of the bridge from where a ball of light was darting in and out of the superstructure – engines dead, electrical systems fried.

Down below, sheets of ice were formed and broke apart, grinding together and the bridge footings.

The pigeons had left for warmer surroundings, leaving their roosts and taking their chances in the high wind that caused the streetlamps to sway and groan as a hand drifted in the muddy water below, a hand with an 8 ball tattooed on it between the thumb and forefinger as the face of the owner was quietly ground away against the rough concrete by the motion of the current.


	5. Chapter 5

"I am definitely incubating influenza," he thought while stepping out of Ecto 1 and onto the windswept deck of Cleveland, Ohio's Hope Memorial Bridge, He blew his nose before adjusting his hood against the arctic blast of horizontal Lake effect snow.

They had been waiting for him inside the fire station, Ecto 1 idling, winter coats pulled on over their coveralls. The painting was left propped against Janine's desk as with an aching head, he'd climbed into the old converted ambulance without any clear idea of where they were going.

Janine handed in coffee, sandwiches and a map before tossing a box of tissues at Egon from a safe distance, "I don't know what you're comin' down with _MISTER_ Spengler, but keep it to yourself – I'm not getting' paid enough to catch _your_ germs!"

Janine had been like that since the 4th of July bar-b-cue on the roof when Peter shoved the two of them into the third floor broom closet, locking them in.

This led to exactly 60 minutes and 35.2 seconds of awkward but not exactly unpleasant fumbling around in the dusty darkness until Winston needed more charcoal - both came tumbling out wearing each other's glasses with Janine yanking her skirt down and her halter up and Egon's shirt hanging out in the back. Those outside the closet cheered –after hurling Egon's glasses at him and snatching hers off of his face, Janine stormed home, refusing to answer her phone for a week. The knowing smirks Ray Stanz still kept shooting Egon every time Janine entered the room told him that plainly there were many things that the boy-faced Ray knew that Egon _didn't _and needed to research. What was strange, Janine now no longer wanted to go with him to museums; something which Egon kept telling himself was unimportant – so why did he always feel a little lost without her on his days off? A geranium as a peace offering might help.

Germs and geraniums aside, the Ohio Department of Transportation had called that morning; something was wrong with one of the bridges leading in and out of Cleveland – something wrong that only they could deal with now that everything else had been tried.

The bridge superintendent, hunched against the cold despite his heavy coat, filled them in on what had happened: for the last five days what they thought was a routine electrical fault kept stalling traffic on the bridge. A man had been injured when the bucket truck he was working out of shorted, burning out all the wiring in the hydraulics and engine – by ball lightning that acted like a mean dog. That same day, the electrical systems of vehicles crossing the bridge burned out, which meant traffic was brought to a halt by stalled vehicles needing to be towed. Ball lightning had been spotted bouncing off of hoods and windshields; anyone who left their vehicles got chased.

While Ray and the superintendent tried to hold onto a schematic of the bridge in the high wind as Winston and Peter suited up, Egon took out his PKE meter, activating it. Throat raw, he started walking across down the broken yellow line, intently watching the little screen – yes, there was something there, something he'd never seen before… sizzling, a ball of lightning rose up out of the salt and sand dusted asphalt beneath his feet, knocking him sprawling and his glasses flying.

"Whoah, whoah, WHOAH – man down! Man down" Peter yelled, dropping his proton pack and running towards Egon, who lay looking up at the dirty looking sky, hair on end, PKE meter in smoking pieces fanned around him. Ray ran up, and dropped to his knees, trying to support Egon's head, "Help me get him up, Peter easy, easy, watch his head,.oh my God, he's heavier than he looks!" Winston crab-ran, bring up the rear, proton pack activated, warily tracking Egon's assailant as it lazily bounced across the pavement, and with a hiss, flipped over the side with a gibbering Slimer right behind it.

"No mom, I'm not going to blow up the garage again… I'm going… to… pass out." Egon mumbled, hands reaching up to adjust his glasses, which now lay bent and half melted on the asphalt behind them even as Ray and Peter tried to get him off the bridge, one arm over each shoulder. "Has anyone seen my glasses?" Knees buckling under his own weight, Egon pulled free before they could catch him, sending him face down on the cold surface – the rubber soles of his boots were melted.

"Somebody call an ambulance!" Peter yelled. "Fuck, he's stopped breathing – Ray, start CPR!"


	6. Chapter 6

Head feeling like he'd tried another round of self-trepanation, Egon mumbled "Did you do this?" as the Emergency Room staff cut him out of what remained of his clothes; every zipper and fastener which hadn't been blown off was fused shut while any plastic had melted.

"What'd he say?" asked an intern slicing through the heavy cloth of Egon's coveralls.

"He's babbling." replied the doctor on duty before adding "Set up an EKG... I've never seen electricity do _that_ before."

Egon would have found it interesting to learn that the exit wounds on his hands and feet were all in the shape of figure 8s, but he'd passed out again, blearily watching what he thought was be a woman with long black hair wearing a lace dress at his feet beside the intern who was cutting off his melted boots.

He squinted, trying to focus on the blur that was her face; she vanished

After Egon was stabilized and moved to ICU, a janitor mopped up a pool of dirty water at the foot of the table.


	7. Chapter 7

_Egon floated in dirty freezing water, phone on the bedside table ringing as a barefoot woman, lank dark hair flowing about her increasingly indistinct face, lace dress dripping on the floor passed the bright rectangle of light that was the door of his hospital room, paused to look at him before fading away, monitors quietly functioning… _

…_hands, one with an 8 ball tattoo drifting in the muddy water as his face ground away in the gurgling, rushing darkness, cell by cell by cell by cell… the phone falling off the hook untouched… the smell of burning electrical insulation...  
_

… _a frigid hand against his face, resting there as his mother's had when he came to at 14 in a hospital somewhere in Massachusetts after his appendix ruptured, peritonitis nearly killing him so that the Boogey Man who followed him to MIT would have to go hungry for a month…_

… _his mother sat in the darkened room crying – something she never did, his father flatly stating, "Crying about this is irrational; he didn't die." as he mechanically patted her shoulder, voice his usual monotone, face blank, for once not registering icy approval or disapproval, and his mother had screamed at his father, "God dammit, for once, just for once could you be a normal human being? We almost lost him – our son, OUR SON, nearly DIED!" _

…_of his father slowly removing his hand and stiffly walking out of the room, face blanker than ever…his mother regaining her usual composure…_

…_Egon wanted to tell her that he loved them both but what would saying it prove? Of the mashed Twinkie on his hospital pillow, a tinny voice washing out of the phone receiver, "You found it! I thought that bitch of a nurse ate it after all the trouble I went to!"_

_...the smell of burning electrical insulation...  
_

_,.. of his mother coming in, snatching it away from him, and dropping it in to the trash - static coming out the phone receiver as "Damn, I could have eaten it – I saved it from my school lunch after I heard what happened … (static)…stole…. old man's wallet… rode the train (static) bitches at the front desk (static) wouldn't let me see you… (static) not (static) family…. Snuck in when you were sleeping…( static)… nothing to eat all weekend…" _

…_his mother's voice saying "Don't eat that, you don't know where it's been!"_

…_of riding to the hospital in the beat up Venkmann station wagon, head on Peter's aunt's lap, with her stroking his hair as Peter's uncle swerved through traffic to the Emergency Room, the chubby woman with the kind face cooing, "Go ahead, I know it hurts boy-o, I know it hurts, nobody minds if you cry around here boy-o, nobody minds, let it out, I know it hurts…" as a tall, awkward boy in a bow tie and unfashionable pompadour doubled up vomiting from the pain in the back seat, right side burning… of a sudden hot explosion in his right side as they lay him on the County Hospital emergency room examination table, followed by a brief moment of painless clarity all too quickly interrupted by a different kind of pain when a gush of pus and digestive juices flooded his belly, Thanksgiving Dinner at Peter Venkmann's aunt and uncle's people-dog-cat-children-goldfish-hamster crowded little house interrupted when the growing ache that had been mildly inconveniencing him all week blossomed in the middle of the meal, knocking him to his knees out of the chair where he had been sitting trying to keep track of all the names and faces,…_

…_the receiver blasted out static, "…you got turkey? Shit, all I got was stale Fritos!" _

…_and a cold, wet hand rested against his cheek making him shiver even as he pressed into it, the receiver giving off static, and the tinny sound like running water… _

…_8-ball hand floating past his milky eyes, "(static) I can't remember my name… (static)…I think the river (static) washed it away…" _

___...the smell of burning electrical insulation..._

… the hand against Egon's cheek warmed. He opened his eyes, squinting, the red-headed outline against the hall doorway pulled it's hand away, Egon squinted harder, hands itching and burning, the flu a dull ache in the background, "Janine?"

"I brought your other glasses up from New York on my way to the Hope Bridge." Janine's hands were deep in her coat pockets, she scowled, or so he thought, "Ray told me you melted 'em. Again."

Egon managed to put them on. Janine and the bedside monitors came into focus. Yes, she was scowling, "Hope Bridge?"

"Ray called at 2 am., got me right out of bed," Janine scanned the dim room, "He says, "Hey, we got a problem, ship us the spare packs and meters Overnight, the wiring on the ones we have just got fried, and by the way Egon tried to electrocute himself _again_ and his glasses are toast –so ship us the spares if you can find 'em." – so of course there's over two feet of snow on the ground and I can't get a delivery truck to come to the station for pickup – so I loaded 'em all in the back of my car; took me nearly HOURS what with the bad weather– and… _oh my Gawd,_ this hospital is a DUMP, nothing like Manhattan- water all over the floor and the phone off the hook the whole place smells like a burning Tupperware lid, and…and…

…

…

"...Ray said you nearly died in the ambulance."

"I didn't."

"Gee, is that all you can say... oh, _fugheddaboutit!_ - I gotta job to do!" Janine paused in mid-stomp, and scowling, reached out to touch Egon's face, snapping, "I don't know why I bother sometimes!" before retreating back into the brightly lit hallways where a janitor was mopping up a trail of water on the floor in front of his room. Egon, trying to figure out what was wrong with Janine, noticed that the phone on the bedside table was indeed, off the hook - the cord connecting it to the wall looked burned and there was no dial tone.


	8. Chapter 8

The hefty nurse who came to check on Egon an hour later that morning expected to find him in a semi-coma, not staring down at a reverse engineered phone, parts laid out neatly on the covers in the order of disassembly, a blackened half melted wall cord laid out like a dead snake beside a neatly coiled nasal tube and a pile of used dressings. Janine must not have told the nurse at the desk that he was awake on her way out.

Maintaining her composure, the large woman alerted the physician on duty – and Egon spent the rest of the morning discovering a few things about himself:

That the electric charge which had fried his PKE meter, blown him half out of his clothes, and rendered his glasses a twisted mess, should have killed him, but didn't.

That the second degree burns on his hands and feet in the shape of an "8" were rapidly healing, despite the itching, blistering, and peeling... and that picking at it was _not_ a good idea, and

That thanks to the charge he took, Egon now had an interesting second degree burn pattern, like the rhizoids of his favorite pathogenic fungi, adorning his upper torso, shoulders, arms, and back. Regrettably, these fractal scars, which he found fascinating, would fade in time, but hopefully not before he could show them to Janine; though judging how she acted around him lately, this wasn't likely to happen for a while– so he asked the x-ray technician to send copies of the documentary photographs to the fire station back in New York for framing just in case Janine ever changed her mind. These too, itched, blistered, and peeled maddeningly.

A fourth thing Egon learned about himself was that it was better to administer a radioactive iodine I.V. to a research subject prior to a full body CT scan than to BE the research subject; particularly when he had the flu. Shivering and miserable, hot and cold as well as wet and dry all at the same time on the flatbed, which seemed to be rocking like a boat in rough water as the room circled, the interesting experience of GETTING a CT scan had been considerably diminished when he vomited over the side, delaying the experience until the mess could be cleaned up.

And of course the whole experience was rendered worse when Egon then learned that the entire gang, including Janine, had been in the in the little waiting area outside of Radiology and had heard the whole debacle.

But the fifth thing Egon realized about himself happened while going through the CT scan, post-gastro-intestinal upheaval was, that he had been attacked by a second entity, one that had come right at him out of nowhere, shoving him back so that most of the charge presumably dispersed harmlessly into the structure of the bridge as he blacked out out; a shove along while a woman screamed, _"Ah-nee-yo anni!" _

What reminded him was the Korean radiology intern administering the IV. He had asked her if he could have copies of the scans; she had said, "Ah-nee-yo anni… sorry, I forget, I mean, no, I can't do that without your doctor's permission."

Egon had lay on the motorized examination table while the CT scanner clanked and whirred around him, wondering why a ghost in Cleveland would be screaming at him in Korean, one of the few languages he just knew enough of to be able to avoid ordering kim-chi, which always gave him a headache.


	9. Chapter 9

Egon learned one final thing that morning after the CT scan when he raised one sleeve on his hospital gown to show his friends the extremely interesting Lichtenberg figures that the current had burned into his skin. The silence which followed was something he'd never experienced before, Ray pausing in mid story about how the same force later on burned out their proton packs and PKE meters, Peter for once not joking about anything, Winston just stared… while Janine murmured "Oh my GAWD!" over and over again as she sat down on the arm of his wheelchair and held him tight.


	10. Chapter 10

Egon noticed another clue after lunch when a nurse changed the dressings on his upper arms, back, feet and hands: in among the delicate, blistered traceries of the Lichtenberg scars were two distinct handprints.

Small child-sized handprints.

"Ah-nee-yo anni!" Fingers stiff, Egon wrote it out phonetically on a notepad he found in the bedside table. When the ball lightning with a faint image of the number 8 on it rose up out from under his feet two days before, sending him sprawling, it wasn't the ball that knocked him down, but what felt like two hands pushing him out of the way.

He should have asked the intern administering the CT scan what the phrase meant.

Egon pulled the second burned telephone cord out of it's hiding place beneath his pillow and laid it beside the first, the insulation blackened and bubbled, and studied it.

The reading he remembered before the PKE meter shorted out in his hand, causing him to drop it, wasn't for one entity, but two.

Two.

One strong, chaotic, angry.

"Ah-nee-yo anni!"

One weak, but intensely focused.

"Ah-nee-yo anni!"

The phone cords.

The burns… the nightmares, if one could call them that, might not be influenza talking to him.

"Ah-nee-yo anni!"

Staring out at the heavy snow falling from a white sky, Egon made a decision and called the nurse on duty, complaining Peter Venkman style that he couldn't sleep: the pain was unbearable, the itching was miserable, his head hurt, and could he have something for it NOW?

An hour later, heavily sedated through a fresh I.V., Egon felt himself falling upwards even as the cord on the new phone beside the bed started to bubble and blister to the scent of burning insulation…


	11. Chapter 11

_Egon found himself in a place where water ran everywhere, mingled with the sound of the wind and burning electrical wire, as images of an Asian looking woman and Erzulie faded in and out around him._

_The water was so cold it hurt. Snow landed on the broken ice at the foot of a bridge, snow made up of the number 8 rotating sideways into infinity._

"_What has all this to do with me?" His voice blared in and out, full of static, like a bad phone connection._

_The out of focus ghost in a lace dress stared past Egon, face, mingling with the now almost faceless outline of Erzulie, "You only (static) one she trust." (static) "You… best friend… (static) is so?_

_Trust? Friend? Aside from an irrational fight in kindergarten, sharing opposite ends of the only otherwise empty table in the lunch room, and once having to share a bus seat with her on a field trip, Egon couldn't remember having had much to do with the irrational neighbor from his childhood… besides his defeat in third grade Science Fair… then Egon remembered… _

…_it had been a bad night._

_Worse, while sliding beneath his workbench in the darkened garage that night, 11-year old Egon encountered an unexpected body in the refuge that for years he'd claimed as his own whenever things became too intense. The body said "Ow, SON OF A BITCH!" in a squeaky whisper._

_Outside the rain continued to fall on Cleveland, indifferent to the silent struggle in the garage as he and Erzulie slapped and clawed at each other. It had to be Erzulie - there were what felt like braids in the tangle of fingernails, bony knees, sharp elbows and sharper teeth that the two of them had become in the cramped space beneath the workbench that he was getting too big to fit under._

"_Errrrr-zuuuuuuu-LIEEEEEE," a man's voice sang out._

_Erzulie froze, heartbeat thudding hard against Egon's chest._

"_Errrrr-ZUUUUUUUUUUUulieeeee – BITCH! Get on out here NOW – I ain't kiddin'!" There was the sound of a belt being unbuckled… Whimpering, Erzulie dug her nails into Egon's arms - both jumped when the back door slammed open, _

"_MISTER Sappington, this is the third time this month you have trespassed. Leave this property at once or I will call the police."_

"_So what if I don't wanna, dirty JEW?"_

_Egon and Erzulie clung to each other, barely breathing as the voices of their fathers rose and fell, Erzulie stopped whimpering as a siren followed by a more voices, professional sounding ones, joined the argument outside; Egon's mother had called the police._

_Erzulie relaxed, sobbing with her face buried in Egon's shirt in the cramped space as loud threats (her father), logical droning, (his father), and the bored flat voices of two cops all too used to being called out on bad nights to deal with neighborhood squabbles, came to them through the sound of rain drumming on the garage roof._

_After 100 heartbeats, Erzulie's father stumbled into the night, knocking over the trash cans beside the garage as he went, belt slapping against the painted siding in time to his lurching steps while Egon's father went back inside, locking the doors behind him as the police drove away._

_Erzulie shifted, elbowing him in the side before asking with a crackle of cellophane, "Want some?"_

_Before Egon could say yes or no, she pushed something sticky into his hand, "Don't worry, I didn't steal it – I saved if from Donnie Darkowsi's classroom birthday party, eat up!"_

_Cautiously Egon took a bite, recognizing the forbidden taste of Twinkie. Savoring the vanilla cream sugariness for as long as he could, letting it slowly dissolve in his mouth as Erzulie gobbled her share in the darkness._

_Swallowing, Egon asked in the gasoline and snack cake smelling darkness, "Your father was really upset. What did you do?" Egon's own father never raised his voice around him, but the cold silences had felt like slaps to the face until he managed to do something to get his father to look at him again with approval – like earning a fourth doctorate before he was twenty._

_Erzulie was silent for a long time, before whispering:"I asked the son of a bitch to sign my grade card. I made him spill his beer."_

_The rain finally stopped, but neither Erzulie nor Egon noticed, having dozed off in each other's arms._

_Egon woke the next day alone._

_He dressed, threw away the Master's Degree program rejection letter from Cornell, and went to the bus stop. Erzulie was there with the other kids; slouched off to one side in her usual blue jean sullen silence, one eye blacked, lower lip swollen._

_Egon called her name._

_Scowling, Erzulie looked past him, eyes tracking something that wasn't there until the bus came and they all got on._

_That evening other scholarships were waiting for him on the dinner table beside his plate. There were other schools. Good schools that didn't mind if you were only eleven, or if your father wasn't a big car deaer - as long as you could add to their academic prestige._

_He never saw Erzulie alive again._


	12. Chapter 12

_A 6 p.m. collect call to Winter Park, Florida from a hospital pay phone:_

"Mother, what can you tell me about the people who live behind you, the Sappingtons?"

"The Sappingtons? (Long silence.) Ralph Sappington is a worthless drunk who never mows his lawn until the city tells him to. Why last week before I flew to Winter Park to visit my sister and to look at the house she wants me to share with her, I heard him screaming at somebody… at four in the morning! Then his shed burned down – he wasn't there so _I_ had to call the fire department!"

"No, not Sappington, his daughter. She would be about my age."

"Who, Elizabeth?"

"_Erzulie_. Why didn't you ever let me play with her?"

"Your father took one look at them the day they moved in and said, "Trash." He was right."

…

…

"…was there ever a wife, a woman other than his mother?"

"No, I think he must have ordered Erzulie from the back of a comic book for fifty cents… no, wait… there _was_ one. He had two, you know, wives."

"Do you remember her, the first one?

"She was foreign, a tiny thing, with dark hair, nothing like that fat bottle blonde – I never saw her up close – he used to beat her. One day she wasn't there - leaving MISTER Sappington to take care of a newborn – not that I blame her, but she could have taken the baby with her… a terrible woman! He brought his mother up from…where was it? Some place where they don't wear shoes and live in log cabins with dirt floors – not that she was any improvement, she screamed all the time: she _said_ there were horrible things attacking her – I never saw a thing. Neither did your father."

"Didn't you try to help?"

"After MISTER Sappington called us a bunch of dirty Jews when your father asked him to mow his lawn? We've been Presbyterians since 1956! Your father told me to ignore them. Besides, I was too busy raising a Spengler; it took all my time to give your father the son he deserved. I'm not surprised that _Erzulie_ turned out to be as trashy as her father – the police were over there all the time – I caught her rummaging around in our garbage cans like a stray dog theThanksgiving you didn't come home from college_ -_ your father called the police."

…

…

("…mother, did you love him?")

"Who? The line must have gone bad, I can't hear you – what did you say?"

"Mother, did you love him?"

"Love who?"

"My father."

"Mister Spengler was a wonderful man, a genius."

"Did you love him?"

"It was an honor to be Mister Spengler's wife. He was brilliant."

"I ASKED, did, you, love, him?"

"I was very lucky to be Mister Spengler's wife."

…

…

…click.


	13. Chapter 13

It was Janine who drove Egon out to the Hope Bridge that evening, a full moon low on the horizon and three feet of snow on the ground.

The snowplow which unintentionally led the way gave him time to think as he watched the high, arching rooster tails of snow fly out from either side of the huge truck as it lumbered down the street ahead of them, leaving salt and sand in it's wake.

Or rather, it would have, had Janine not taken this as an opportunity to tell Egon exactly how she felt about his checking himself out of the hospital against his doctor's wishes, and showing up at the door of the cheap hotel she'd been stranded in for the last day or so no thanks to the early blizzard she'd driven up in.

"…are you even listening to me?"

"Huh?"

"I SAID, you gave the flu to everybody, and I'm not feeling so hot myself."

Egon had to admit that after walking three blocks from the hospital, that when he'd knocked on the door of the cheap motel room Peter, Ray and Winston were camping out in until the weather settled down, all he'd gotten was a moan and the sound of a toilet flushing.

The frowsy curtain on the outside window then twitched, followed by a hand shakily flipping him the bird.

Obviously that had been Peter.

Janine stood in the doorway of the room next door, watching him the whole time, "Don't bother, it's been like that ALL NIGHT – and what the hell are you doing out of the hospital?"

Egon's immediate answer to that was a loud wet sneeze.

Wiping off her glasses, Janine handed him a box of tissues and then let him in to her Oprah blaring room.

Thirty minutes passed before grumbling, Janine came out in her winter coat and boots and started digging out the beat up yellow le Car that replaced the red Beetle Ray had accidentally demolished earlier during what at first had seemed an earthquake in downtown Manhattan.

Two hours later Egon found himself crammed into the little vehicle, tissue box in hand and knees pressed against the dashboard, the back seat overflowing with what gear he had managed to retrieve from Ecto 1 (which was buried up to the roof rack from when an earlier snowplow had gone past) regretting that he'd forgotten that Janine didn't so much DRIVE her car as AIM it – snarling at other drivers while standing on the horn.

The driver of the snowplow ignored Janine, refusing to speed up his huge yellow truck, flashing lights and all. However, a hand using the same gesture as Peter's came out of the driver's side window when she leaned out the cracked window of the leCar and screamed Brooklyn Height's endearment at him as she passed him at the Hope Bridge turnoff.

The little yellow car with the wired on bumper skidded to a sideways halt, knocking over several flashing orange barrels.

Egon got out, having decided that though the street department had been unable to clear the bridge thanks to it's being haunted, walking through thirty six inches of uncleared snow to where he had been nearly electrocuted three days before wasn't a problem.


	14. Chapter 14

And in the dark where the ice shattered and boomed as the water wove around it, a body, now faceless, rolled over in the current, facing upward.


	15. Chapter 15

"Egon, wait! You forgot your hat!"

Dragging the long tail of an improvised grounding cable, he turned, just a little over knee deep in the snow. Janine was floundering towards him nearly up to her hips in the trail that he had blazed,. Resettling the coil of rope over one itching, peeling shoulder, he yelled back, "No, Janine, stay with the car like I told you!"

"But it's 10 below, your ears will… aaaaak!" Janine disappeared, followed by a wail.

Egon dropped the rope, the trap and his proton pack, shoving the PKE meter into a side pocket and made his way to where he'd last seen her, the rising moon casting blue shadows on the unbroken snow covering the Hope bridge in contrast to the orange sodium lights overhead.

"Janine, where are you?"

"Down here." Came a very small voice almost underfoot, "I think I found a pothole."

"Stay put, I'll get you." He clicked on the lamp on the subway worker's helmet he'd added at the last minute to his equipment. Janine squinted up at him in the sudden burst of light, buried up to her armpits, "Are you all right?

"No, I don't think so, but snow went up my coat and I think I lost your hat."

"That's Peter's hat you lost."

"Whatever." She raised her hands to him, "This is going on my overtime sheet, y'know."

He crouched, taking her hands, "Hold tight… on the count of three… one… two…thr…"

"Aaaak!" That was Janine again, "I lost my boots, and those were my good ones - you guys owe me a new- whatthehellisthat?" She looked past Egon's shoulder and he dropped her back into the hole. "Owwwww, I think my ankle's broken!"

Unaware of Janine's complaint Egon pulled out the PKE meter, activated it and started scanning, eyes wary – the grounding cable might not work in snow.

Janine screamed as Egon landed on top of her, the ball lightning which had sent him to the hospital a few days before sizzling overhead.


	16. Chapter 16

Overhead the ball lightning shot away towards the exit ramp of the bridge. Egon relaxed, only to cower down into the snow on top of Janine, who had gone silent. The spitting orb wheeled around, coming in low and fast.

Hoping the grounding cable would work, Egon covered his head with his hands and buried his face in Janine's coat, expecting another blast of electricity.

…

…

…

Finally he raised his head; spinning right over them, the ball lit up the snow in stark black and white shadows, a much smaller pinpoint of light orbiting it.

No, not orbiting, herding.

The ball of lightning sizzled, lunging at Egon and Janine. The smaller light immediately placed itself between it and them.

Egon came up to his knees in the deep snow, staring upwards, glasses reflecting the energy being given off taking out and activating his PKE meter.

If his suspicions were right, what Egon was looking for was right below them – the second light just added to the evidence.


	17. Chapter 17

"…and another thing, when's the last time you guys paid me on time? Or at least covered the gas for me coming up here with all the backup equip…"

For someone with a broken ankle, Janine had a lot of energy, even hanging by the back of her coat from one of the large Art Deco statues adorning the Hope Memorial Bridge.

Once Egon realized that the smaller of the two lights circling them was holding the larger one at bay so that all it could do was dart at them, he'd hauled the secretary out of the snowpit and tried to put her on her feet.

Janine had collapsed whimpering before bursting into tears – something Egon had never seen her do before, so he'd hauled her to the side with the two lights feinting and dodging around them, and sat her on the railing. Once she'd settled down he'd pulled off her boot, which only got more crying, poked at the swollen foot, put the hat that caused all the trouble in the first place on it because trying to get the boot back on only made things worse, and bound up the whole mess with duct tape so it wouldn't fall off.

The duct tape refused to stick in the now arctic cold, but he managed to use it as a strap of sorts before hanging her up by the coat when she tried to follow him over the side.

Maybe he should have aborted at that point. No, he should have aborted at that point, Egon thought as he dangled coatless in a borrowed coverall over the half frozen Cuyahoga River, the ice cracking and booming in the current.

Above him, Janine continued her tirade, "…the things I do for YOU and you never even say thank you…"

Egon played out a little more rope; he'd held her for a few minutes until she'd settled down, the shared body heat had been pleasant and she'd smelled really good. Then the lights circled around them, the smaller of the two dancing around even as it held off the larger, giving off increasing urgency.

So he'd placed Janine where she dangled above the snow, sputtering, promising he'd be back quickly, there was something that needed doing.

"…and you didn't even check out of the hospital? You should be in bed!"

Perhaps Egon shouldn't have admitted that he'd not really checked out, but walked out in a borrowed coat, boots, and coveralls that he'd found in a janitorial closed by the Emergency Room entry way. The owner had been considerably shorter, so his legs kept popping out of the coveralls, and the boots too broad, but that wasn't important – something Janine didn't seem to realize.

"…what is it, am I not attractive enough?" She had started crying again.

Egon bounced off the bridge piling, sliding down further, the rope playing out smoothly – what Janine's appearance had to do with this was beyond him. Luckily a bridge inspection team had been working near where he needed to go before the ball lightning had driven them off nearly a week ago, leaving behind their equipment - this trapping would be relatively easy.

Better yet, Janine's unhappy rant was fading away in the growing distance, replaced by the silence of wind in the underpinnings of the bridge and the sound of ice.

He could think now.


	18. Chapter 18

A few yards down and the wind began to pick up, right off the Great Lakes, carrying more Canadian snow with it. Egon kicked off the bridge support, the light from his subway worker's helmet staining the weathered concrete yellow as the two lights that circled him in his downward descent began to flicker.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Rappelling had been one of the few good things that he'd managed to salvage from the mandatory Army ROTC classes he'd been forced to take once he hit 18. Things had gone so badly on the physical training end that even his instructor, a large, loud, optimistic man had given up on Egon – seeing to it that he didn't have to take the remaining courses in order to graduate after Egon broke both thumbs and his nose on the basic confidence course twice and concussed himself on the rifle range.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Ropework had been a different story. There was something soothing about hanging on a single rope high above the world.

Nobody bothered him.

It was just the wind.

No puzzling social codes he never could break in time.

No looks of parental disapproval when he failed at something he should have understood.

No tripping over his own big feet.

No being taken for an adult because of his size – no fights that he didn't start.

Just the wind.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Flying.

With a single rope to keep him from drifting off into the stratosphere.

Kick.

Another few yards.

It was a useful skill with a logic all it's own.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Physics made physical.

Not quite freefall, but close enough.

Still, maybe he shouldn't have wrapped his coat around Janine before going on rappel, though by now he was coated with a thin layer of sweat, one part physical exertion, two parts influenza.

Kick.

Another few yards.

The lights circled again, the larger one giving off angry, hissing buzzing sparks tinged with red, he was halfway there.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Squinting, Egon looked up; there were distant faces yelling at him over the railing. Somebody must have seen Janine and rescued her.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Another pass from the lights, the smaller between the larger.

Kick.

Another few yards.

Uh oh.

The rope he was on wasn't as long as he'd calculated.

Swinging back and forth in the snow filled wind, Egon looked down at the jam of ice and branches caught against the current side of the bridge piling.

He looked up. Janine, was yelling at him, words incomprehensible in the rising wind, a fireman or paramedic on either side of her.

Whatever it was she wanted, it would have to wait.

Hoping that what he was about to do would work, Egon dropped the trap that he'd hooked to his belt so that it dangled in the open space above the source of the haunting and activated his proton pack, the roar of the river all but drowning out it's accelerating hum.


	19. Chapter 19

The snow and sleet laden wind hissed, clawing at the rope holding Egon above the river, swinging him back and forth - the larger of the two lights, flickering like an old television with a bad tube circled, buzzing and hissing.

A whistling gust sent him dangerously close to the lightly coated with ice concrete – one booted foot absently fending it off as he read the screen on the PKE meter: the source of all the trouble was down at the base of the pillar.

Another gust, another kick, sleet stinging against three days of beard, the other light had a different source, outside the meter's range.

A long drawn out howl of wind, ropes creaking, sizzling lights, Egon ducked, trying to fend off the larger, the smaller one placing itself between it and him, more stinging sleet, a bounce off the concrete and the helmet falling off, spinning slowly, lamp sending up lazy flashes of light to hit the ice and branches below with a hollow "clonk" briefly illuminating a clear patch of ice with a human shape in it before going out.

Head hard against icy concrete, Egon smelled blood; ears ringing, he dropped everything, going limp in the Swiss seat…


	20. Chapter 20

Stunned, bent glasses hanging from one ear, Egon felt himself in two places, two heads at once high above the ice moving through a whirling unraveling of thoughts like a tangled spool of electrical wires… snatches of music and static like the changing of stations on a car radio…

_…no time left for you…the strong fishy taste of the liquid in a jar marked "Gefelte" found in a garbage can one night out behind the neighbor's house, the one where the odd-looking but fascinating boy with a huge ant farm lived,..the house with a Christmas tree (wish we had one) in the front window like everyone else and a funny looking candle holder with a star on it and nine candles that were lit every night one by one… wishing to try the strange foods being eaten at the table, everyone sitting stiffly around the table, nobody looking at each other…_

…of swinging back and forth, sleet stinging his face the sound of wind in ropes even as those ropes frayed and tore high overhead…

_...why does he need all those ants in his room? Ants belong in the kitchen in the pantry on the crackers when there are crackers…no time left for you…the robin that built a nest with three greedy babies in on my window sill… bet he'd like it, wish I could show it to him but he doesn't like me… wish I could knock on their door… it's cold out tonight, if I knocked on their door they'd call the cops…. I'm hungry… they'd call the cops…the old man would beat me again…_

...of two lights, one large with an 8 blazing on it, one small and intense, circling… circling… the sensation of a trap's foot pedal in his hand… the soft whine of a proton pack on standby…

_…seasons changed… distant roads…calling me…why can't I play with him daddy? "Ain't goin' near them dirty Jew – they done killed Jesus!"… of coming home from school to find that the old man had found the precious stash of discarded Barbies scrounged from trash cans and dressed and mended and given them to Granny to play with…granny who sat naked in the front yard screaming… surrounded by headless dolls…heads flushed down the toilet because they were evil… running away… roads are calling me… wandering through Woodstock stoned, rainbows in the sky… a torn lace dress made of curtains… humping in the mud with anyone, eyes on the rainbows in the sky… abortion… the sweet sting of heroin…I'll find myself some wings… Charlie Manson saying, "Sorry babes, you're just too coo-coo for us!"…wonder what he's doing tonight?_

…fumbling in the cold, fingers clumsy in gloves and bandages, closing down on the pedal… the dangling trap swinging on it's cable opening…bright light spilling out… rope singing and straining… was that Janine yelling?

_…no time for the love you send…_

…the blurry impression of a small light chasing a large light into the trap… the larger light fraying as it resisted capture…ears ringing…

_…the sound of paint on canvas…you need not wonder why… of things with angry faces floating in the wind… wish I could ask to come in… the sensation of falling… the edge of a dirty stove… more falling… the sensation of frigid, dirty water, of being carried away even as he was pulled down…_

The rope snapped.

_…no time left for you…_

Rope slithering behind him, Egon fell the rest of the way, landing on his side on the branch spiked ice where the wind had swept clean a patch, face to face with the faceless remains of someone he'd once known without knowing many years ago… hand relaxing on the pedal so that the lid snapped shut, cutting off the light and the static.


	21. Chapter 21

To say that there were legal repercussions would be an understatement.

Egon spent nearly a month in the same hospital under guard as a "flight risk" – though at the time he was too busy dealing with cracked ribs, a concussion, exhaustion, exposure, a broken wrist, and double pneumonia, to jump bail.

All charges including Murder 1, were dropped when Erzulie's father was overheard by a barmaid in a Cleveland dive bragging that he, "…done did it again: first his gook wife and then his whore of a daughter" while watching Egon's pretrial hearing on the bar television set.

Alarmed, the barmaid called the police.

Louis Tully's stammered arguments that Egon couldn't have possibly been involved because the entire estimated time of Erzulie's death was covered by signed job sheets and service invoices in New York, also helped. The long black hairs and bloodstains found on Mr. Sappington's kitchen stove, floor and in the bed of his truck (which was found abandoned in Kettering, Ohio), were enough to have the policeman removed from Egon's hospital room and the bail refunded once and for all.

The nursing staff, considering Egon's previous unauthorized flight, still kept a close eye on him.

Egon's mother found out what was going on, flew up from Winter Park, Florida and descended upon him with home remedies until the Head Nurses on all shifts had her banned. Had the television announcer not mistaken Egon for Winston Zeddmore as the original "man down", Mrs. Spengler would have been there sooner.

When Egon's mother found out that the rest of the Ghostbusters were holed up with influenza in a nearby cheap motel, she descended upon them like a Valkyrie bearing evil smelling brews. Locked doors didn't stop her.

That spring, the burn marks on Egon's palms and the soles of his feet had completely faded away. The cord on his bedside phone back in New York was found to be burned. A quick check of the maintenance logs of the Subway lines the night he had ridden home with the phrenological head and Erzulie's painting showed that the intercom system on the train had shorted out.

The painting was destroyed; the fire department was called in to deal with a small fire, which a passerby noticed through a Station window – the night Egon went over the side of the bridge on his own. Slimer, who had stayed behind, loudly denied in his own glibbering and meeping way, that no, he hadn't been playing with matches again.

Janine was almost the way she had been before the last 4th of July. Her ankle turned out to be badly sprained, not broken. She didn't say no when Egon asked her to come to the Intrepid Air, Sea, and Space Museum with him – but she insisted he pay her admission and cab fare as an apology for hanging her up by the back of her coat.

When Egon reluctantly went to visit his father's grave with his mother in Cleveland after she finished selling his boyhood home to fund her move to Florida, he learned through an old academic colleague that Erzulie's body lay unclaimed in the County morgue and was scheduled for Indigent Burial as part of a general mass service. A talk with the right County officials allowed him to claim it and have it shipped to New York, making funeral arrangements with a rabbi he occasionally played chess with.

Not much of a believer himself, Egon didn't know what Erzulie's leanings, if any, were, but it seemed the right thing to do.

Erzulie's father didn't object to a Jewish funeral, having died of liver cancer while awaiting trial.

Using Louis Tully as a go-between, Egon purchased the ramshackle Sappington house and deceased appliance-filled yard simply by paying the back taxes. The house, door still displaying crime scene tape, was pulled down, the lot cleared, and sold to a strip mall developer, but not before a partially saponified female body with a fractured skull and wearing the remains of a polyester lace nightgown, was discovered buried where the detached garage had once stood, wrapped in a rotting canvas tarp under a layer of unevenly poured concrete.

The body which was never formally identified, carried both Asian and European features and was estimated to have been roughly fourteen years old at the time of death at barely 4' 8" tall. The pelvis indicated that she had given birth at least once.

Egon too, paid for this funeral, being the only attendee aside from the officiating rabbi. Afterwards, Egon and the rabbi played chess in Central Park.

Curiosity aroused, Egon called in a few favors.

While in the Navy, Ralph Sappington married a half French, half Korean bar girl named Su-Min Kal, also known as "Ga-eul" or "Autumn" because of her brown hair. Su-Min reportedly abandoned the newborn Erzulie and Ralph after the family moved to Cleveland in search of factory work following Ralph's dishonorable discharge.

Egon paid to have the name Su-Min Kal carved into the second headstone and had Erzulie's body and headstone moved beside it.

This too, seemed right.

In between ghost trapping, Egon sifted through the box of meager personal possessions retrieved from Erzulie's waterlogged car as evidence for a trial which never happened.

The car had been found in Lake Eerie, near Ashtabula, Ohio.

Among the few salvageable items, which included several headless Barbie dolls and one troll, Egon found an unmarked black and white I.D. photo of an Asian-looking woman and some of Erzulie's school pictures. Side by side there was enough of a resemblance between the two that it caused Egon to remember what happened one morning in 1962 when some of the other boys jeered "Gook!" and "Slope!" at Erzulie while waiting with their mothers for the school bus. To Egon, these insults made no sense: except for her high cheekbones and heavy dark hair, the blue-eyed Erzulie looked nothing like the Viet Cong in the television news reports his parents watched in worried silence every night after dinner.

By the time it occurred to the boy they called "Dumb Polack!", "Kraut!" and "Dirty Jew!" when they weren't calling him "Pencil Neck!" or "Freak!" that he might have done something to defend the crying little girl wearing tennis shoes two sizes too big for her – the child his father said was beneath him wiped her eyes and nose on the faded sleeve of her plaid boy's shirt and tore into her attackers like a rabid buzz saw while their mothers screamed for help, his own mother looking on in superior disdain as the bus rolled to a stop.

When Egon learned that Erzulie's paternal grandmother and namesake was still alive, he again returned to Ohio and visited the State-run institution where she had been committed. She was well into her eighties, heavily medicated, and mistook him for a long dead younger brother who had died in an Arkansas State home for mental incompetents in the mid-1930'. Screaming about horrible things that weren't there, he ran through a third story window, breaking his neck when he landed in the bushes below. Not bothering to correct the wheelchair bound octogenarian as she beamed up at him, delighted at having a visitor, any visitor, Egon recognized the way her eyes tracked things that his PKE meter couldn't detect, and left her where she was, diagnosed with a rare form of inherited schizophrenia, but happy - the horrible things she saw floating in the air around her could no longer hurt her because the nice doctor, Elvis, and most importantly Jesus, said so.

The old college textbooks he found among Erzulie's personal effects were the ones that had gone missing during his first college summer break, texts dealing mainly with electrical engineering and physics. There were notes scribbled in the margins in Erzulie's handwriting, practice equations, and doodles – some of them of people he knew, including himself.

One day, Egon took the textbooks out of his locker in the fire station and took a cab to the Brooklyn Bridge with them on the seat beside him. He had the driver stop in the middle span, and oblivious to the angry honking and yelling this caused, dropped them over the side.

He got back into the cab, and told the driver to take him someplace where he could buy a potted geranium – which leads to another story entirely.


End file.
